3 - French satire in the late sixteenth century

Summary

My intention is to select some examples of political satire in the time of the French Catholic League, and to draw some inferences about their place in the development of the satiric genre. Any discussion of satire is perplexed by problems of definition. If one talks generally of a satiric temper it is difficult to know where to draw the line. Charles Lenient, the author of the standard nineteenth-century work on the subject, invented a variety of ingenious categories – satire philosophique, satire religieuse, satire politique, satire littéeraire and the like – so that almost anything with a vaguely satiric flavor could be tucked neatly away in his omnium gatherum. At the other extreme, a critic concerned with the particularity of genre is likely to find satire a slippery fish to net. In a recent work on classical and contemporary Italian influence on French sixteenth century satire, Olga Trtnik-Rossettini found it necessary to confine her material to “poems called satires, and isometric pieces in decasyllables or alexandrines in rhymed couplets which are also satiric in character.”

There is also a tradition linking definition with etymology. An early instance in sixteenth-century humanism was the elder Scaliger, who insisted upon the Greek origin of the genre and associated it with the word ∑αατυϱoζ(satyr). At the beginning of the seventeenth century Isaac Casaubon strenuously asserted the counter-position that, while satiric elements might be discerned in Greek poetry, the classical genre was specifically Roman, and was named from satura lanx, the Latin for a dish of mixed foods.